428 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



unite a.u overland telegraph wire from St. Petersburg with that one 

 we were to buikl, in the same fashion, from Portland, Ore., thus 

 to span the Old and New Worlds by this short submarine link. 

 Naturally, then, it made this point of its beginning a most interest- 

 ing locality. In obedience to an order of a few wealthy, energetic 

 capitalists, who did not then believe in the practicability of the At- 

 lantic cable, many stately ships, freighted with men and goods, left 

 San Francisco in the summer of 1865, and, again, in the succeeding 

 season of 18G6, for divers points in Alaska and Siberia. These men 

 were to build the line overland. They were landed at St. Michael's 

 and at Port Clarence, and at several harbors on the Asiatic coast. 

 They had fairly got to woi'k, when, late in 1866, the success of the 

 submarine cable between Newfoundland and Ireland was assured. 

 That success compelled an abandonment of the Collins Overland 

 Telegraph, and these men were consequently recalled, and sailed 

 back to California in those handsome vessels of the telegraph fleet. 

 How the Innuits of Port Clarence marvelled when these smart, 

 richly dressed men disembarked, and put up houses in which to 

 store their treasures of food and telegraph materials, as well as to 

 actually live in — to stay there with them, in their own rude country, 

 where no such thing had ever been even dreamed of before. After 

 the ships had squared their yards and filled away, without calling 

 the Americans on board, then the Mahlemoot heart was filled with 

 unknown and strange emotions of joy and curiosity — both of these 

 passions were fully satisfied ere the white men left Grantley Harbor. 

 With Cape York just astern, you pass under the lee of those 

 sheer and lofty walls of that shoulder to our continent, Cape Prince 

 of Wales. Its bold front stands in full but silent recognition of an 

 Asiatic coast westward, just thirty-six miles away, over the shallow 

 flood of Bering Straits. What changes in a great northland and 

 seas would have been wrought had a tithe of such volcanic energy 

 which raised vip the Aleutian archipelago been only exerted here in 

 throwing a basaltic dike across from continent to continent ! Had 

 the upheaval and power that elevated the large island of Oonimak 

 alone been focused here, we should have no division of the Old 

 World and the New. That ocean-river which flows steadily into 

 the icy wastes of a known and unknown polar basin above Alaska 

 and Siberia would not now give that life which it so freely grants 

 both animals and vegetables in the wide reach of the North Pacific. 

 A dam of adamantine rock or basalt across the Straits of Bering 



